Ronald Gruia, program leader for emerging communications at market research firm Frost & Sullivan Canada, said portable phones that use the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi protocol use more battery juice than conventional cellphones because they constantly communicate with the nearest Wi-Fi access point.
As a result, Gruia said, mobile phone equipment manufacturers are finding it difficult to make a Wi-Fi phone with a battery life that will be long enough to satisfy road warriors who are used to cellphones with four-hour batteries.
Gruia, who moderated a panel discussion titled “Mobility Disruption: 3G and Wi-Fi,” said dual-mode handsets that work on both cellular and Wi-Fi networks often cost $400 to $500, putting them out of the price range of many business users. Despite the high cost and short battery lives, many companies are in the market for this type of dual-mode device, said Philip Richards, director of product marketing for Toronto-based fixed mobile convergence vendor Newstep Networks Inc. “Increasingly, we see people picking up their cellphones in the home, picking up the mobile phone in the office when they have a perfectly good fixed line that they could use,” Richards said during the panel discussion.
Only 14 per cent of cellphone calls are made while the users are actually mobile, while the remainder are made from fixed locations, said Ray Vilis, vice-president of product management at Gatineau, Que.-based Versatel Networks Inc.
Users who make calls from an internal Wi-Fi network would not have to pay air time charges to a cellular provider, but this should not deter wireless carriers from reselling this type of device, Richards said.
This is because most corporate cellphone users are actually calling from their own phones and submitting expense claims, so a carrier with a corporate account will not necessarily be providing service to all of that company’s mobile users.